HYPNOSIS STILL PROVOKES SOME SKEPTICS

Published: March 31, 1987

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Dr. Spanos, though, sees ''talent'' at hypnosis as being little more than a sharpened sensitivity to subtle cues and an openness to suggestion. Dr. Spanos said that hypnotists typically do not ask outright that the subject do something, but rather suggest indirectly that it should happen. For instance, instead of saying ''Imagine there is a cat in your lap,'' the hypnotist suggests it by saying there is a cat in the person's lap, implying that he should perceive it. The subtlety of these cues, Dr. Spanos argues, accounts for the variation in the extent to which people are susceptible to hypnosis.

''Many people miss the hidden commmand, and so fail,'' said Dr. Spanos. ''If the hypnotist suggests their arm is rising, they just wait for it to rise instead of having it do so.''

Nearly 30 years ago, Dr. Orne, one of the major experts on hypnosis, introduced the concept of trance logic, which he described as the tendency to fuse everyday reality with imaginary perceptions in a manner that ignores everyday logic. In his original research, Dr. Orne had highly suggestible hypnotic subjects look at a chair in which person had been sitting and ''see'' the person still sitting there. He also asked another group of people to pretend they had been hypnotized and simulate the same experience. Thinking Under Hypnosis

When instructed to look at the actual person, who was standing behind them, some of those who had been hypnotized reported an odd effect: they could look back and forth at the real person standing there and his image in the chair. Those who were pretending to be hypnotized, on the other hand, often pretended that the actual person was somebody else or was not there at all, Dr. Orne said.

These findings suggest that there is something about the way people think under hypnosis that is different from normal thought, he said.

But Dr. Spanos, based on his own and other research on trance logic, draws a different conclusion. He has found that when people who are not hypnotized are asked to imagine an image with their eyes open, they find it quite difficult to evoke a crisp, solid image. If they can call to mind an image, it typically is transparent. His interpretation is that this is just what happened in Dr. Orne's trance logic experiment: the people who were hypnotized reported two images -the transparent, imaginary one and the real person - because of subtle cues suggesting that is what they should do, cues those who simulated hypnosis did not have because they did not receive the same implicit cues.

But in a rejoinder to Dr. Spanos, David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford Medical School, points to his own research showing that hypnotic hallucinations can be objectively measured. In Dr. Spiegel's study, reported in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, volunteers were hypnotized and told to imagine a cardboard box blocking their view of a television screen. Those volunteers who were highly hypnotizable showed a marked change in the evoked potential, a measure of brain activity. The change, according to Dr. Spiegel, was compatible with one that would occur if their view of the screen had actually been blocked, but not with merely imagining the box.

''It is not just compliance or pretense,'' said Dr. Spiegel. ''It is actually happening in the brain.'' Pattern of Forgetfulness

Among other scientific reports of behavior that seems unique to hypnosis, Dr. John Kihlstrom, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, found that people who had been hypnotized - but not those who simulated it - showed a pattern or forgetfulness like that of amnesia caused by disease.

Nevertheless, researchers have been unable to find any measurable differences in the brain or body of people under hypnosis that appear uniquely and consistently during hypnosis. Instead, they find patterns that vary according to whether the hypnotist has suggested deep relaxation or intense activity.

''There won't be a psychophysiological correlate of hypnosis for a long time, if ever,'' said Dr. Kihlstrom ''But that does not mean that hypnosis is not a special state of focused attention. It's like rapid eye movements and dreams: dreams were real before the discovery that rapid eye movements accompanied them.''

Most of Dr. Kihlstrom's research has been about hypnotically-induced amnesia. But with colleagues at Wisconsin, Dr. Robert Nadon and Dr. Richard Davidson, he is undertaking a new study to see whether the right hemisphere of the brain is particularly active during hypnosis in highly hypnotizable people. ''I don't expect the experiment to prove the psychophysiological reality of a hypnotic state,'' he said, ''but rather to link hypnosis to what is known about cognitive neuropsychology,'' particularly memory. Use in Law Enforcement

As the nature of hypnosis is argued, its use by law officers to refresh the memory of witnesses to crimes is also under serious challenge. Although these memories are often reliable, witnesses' hypnotically refreshed memories have sometimes been proved false, even though the witnesses were convinced of their truth. Dr. Orne chaired a panel of the Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association that strongly recommended against the practice.

Despite all the objections to hypnosis, its use in psychotherapy has grown with great speed in recent years. Indeed, clinicians who use hypnosis point out that the question of whether there is anything special about a hypnotic trance is not necessarily relevant to its clinical use, where what matters is how well it seems to work.

There are more than a half-dozen professional associations for hypnotists who are not regulated in the way other medical specialities are. Officials of these groups, citing attendance at workshops and other indicators, said they believed that the numbers of therapists and others using hypnosis has more than doubled in the last 10 years.

Most therapists who use hypnosis are undisturbed by the debate. ''There are at least six major theories of what hypnosis is, from role playing to dissociation to an altered state,'' said Jeffrey Zeig, director of the Milton H. Erickson Society in Phoenix. ''Your theoretical lens determines what you see in hypnosis. Seen most broadly, hypnosis involves all of those.''